Or maybe you want to go completely nuts with the Resizable Texture Panels and have access to more than 16 textures. Maybe you want to give two Scouts different hair colours. Maybe you want to change the text on a billboard without changing it on other billboards. Maybe you want to use alpha layers to punch a hole in a zombie to expose it's gooey innards, Left 4 Dead style.
There are a lot of reasons why you'd want to change the texture on one specific instance of a model without changing it for all of the others.